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Cairn

Remember what God has done

Cairn is a prayer journal built on one metaphor that does a lot of work: a prayer enters as an open stone, and turns to gold when it is marked answered. A cairn is what you leave behind so you can find the path again.

Memory is the actual product. The app exists so that a year later you can look back and see what was asked and what was answered — which is the part a notes app never gives you.

Tagline
A quiet place to bring your prayers, mark His answers, and look back on your year with God.
Model
Free · Cairn+ subscription, 7-day trial
What we built
01

Two-tap capture, voice or text

Prayer happens at inconvenient moments. Anything slower than two taps loses the thought, so capture was optimised before anything else.

02

Guided sessions and daily declarations

ACTS-structured prayer sessions for people who want a frame, and daily declarations rooted in Scripture for those who want a starting point.

03

Faith Wrapped

An annual retrospective over a year of prayers and answers — the memory thesis made concrete, and the moment the stone-to-gold metaphor pays off.

04

Shared and answered prayer

Shareable "Pray with me" requests, and answered-prayer testimonies that turn a private record into something that can be passed on.

05

Two platforms, one feel

iOS and Android, with a navy-starfield dark mode and parchment light mode that hold the same mood on both.

The hard parts

Where this one was genuinely difficult.

Longitudinal data that has to stay private

Years of somebody’s most personal writing is the most sensitive data in the portfolio. It shapes every storage, sync and AI decision in the product.

Guidance without guilt

The category norm is accountability pressure and streak anxiety. Cairn deliberately declines it, which means motivation has to come from the retrospective instead of the nag.

Cross-platform without cross-platform mush

Shipping iOS and Android together while keeping a typography-forward, deliberately calm aesthetic intact on both.

Capabilities applied

Cross-platform mobilePrivacy-sensitive dataAI-guided sessionsVoice captureSubscription design